Philosopher's Zone: "The Mind of Jacques Lacan." September 24, 2011.

Jacques Marie Emile Lacan, who died in 1981, was a French psychoanalyst and follower of Freud, but his influence has extended far beyond the boundaries of psychiatry: to philosophy, critical theory, literary theory, sociology, feminist theory, film theory and clinical psychoanalysis. And all this despite a literary style of forbidding complexity. This week, we take courage and try to penetrate his thought.

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone/stories/2011/3324385.htm

Klein-Lacan Dialogues Seminar Series, Psychoanalysis Unit at University College London, the Centre for Psychoanalysis at Middlesex University and the Research Department at the Royal College of Art, University College London, October 23, 2010-June 18, 2011.

The seminars are geared at comparing and contrasting some main psychoanalytic concepts as they have been developed by these two schools of thought. Speakers will address the issues from both a theoretical and a clinical perspective.

Schedule:

Introduction, 23 October 2010
Symbolic Function, 20 November 2010
Ego, 4 December 2010
Object, 15 January 2011
Body, 12 February 2011
Trauma, 12 March 2011
Autism, 9 April 2011
Affect, 21 May 2011
History-Archives, 18 June 2011
 
For more information, visit: http://www.mdx.ac.uk/research/areas/psychology/psychoanalysis/klein-lacan/index.aspx.

Cfp: "Critical Social Theory: Freud and Lacan for the 21st Century," 7th Annual Social Social Theory Forum, University of Massachusetts, Boston, April 7-8, 2010.

This year’s conference will explore the relationship between psychoanalysis and critical social theory. From its very beginning Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis has walked the border as a kind of fugitive discipline in academia yet one multifarious in its influence on the mainstream. Surely the welter of hostile and critical responses accompanying its trajectory in the history of ideas bears a kind of testimony to its rich intellectual underpinning. In sociology it has had a creative influence on critical theorists such as Herbert Marcuse, Eric Fromm, and others of the Frankfurt School, and now has engaged feminist theorists, post-structuralists and other sociologists interested in the way in which unconscious processes figure in the construction of hierarchical social relations.

Jacque Lacan’s French reading of Freud comes particularly close to the sociological imagination. His theory of the symbolic order and the linguistic precursors of the unconscious have added additional dimensions to the discourse of social theory. His notion of the decentered and alienated self rooted in the intellectual culture of Emile Durkheim, Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Michel Foucault find its corollaries in the writings of sociologists and philosophers such as George Herbert Mead, Charles Horton Cooley, and Erving Goffman. This year’s Social Theory Forum provides an opportunity for a re-examination and discussion of these fertile intellectual domains for a new cross-disciplinary pursuit of scholarship in social theory. The conference organizers seek papers that employ rigorous analyses and interpretations of the past and present of these intellectual engagements that form the foundation of modern social theory.

Papers in feminist theory, queer theory, literary criticism, social linguistics, conversational analysis, philosophy of mind, etc. that engage and interrogate Freud or Lacan are all welcomed.

The conference will feature both invited and submitted papers and presentations. We welcome submissions from scholars and graduate students in humanities and social sciences and as well as from writers in allied disciplines. We ask that authors submit a one-page abstract as email attachment (MS Word Format) to SocialTheoryAbstracts@libraryofsocialscience.com no later than February 9, 2010. Upon selection and notification of approval by the organizing committee, submitters must send completed presentation paper manuscripts (around 12-15 pages, preferably double-spaced in Times 12 typeface) by March 15, 2010. We are in the process of securing a publishing venue for selected papers. As in prior years, the papers will be peer-reviewed by anonymous referees for possible publication. Details will be announced before the conference.

Pub: LACAN AND CRITICAL PSYCHOLOGY. ANNUAL REVIEW OF CRITICAL PSYCHOLOGY 7 (2009).

Editor’s Introduction: Lacan for Critics! by Carol Owens I

• A Place for Lacan in Critical Psychology? Four Memos and a Gap by Annie G. Rogers
• Lacan Goes Business by Carl Cederström
• Untying Real, Imaginary and Symbolic: a Lacanian Criticism of Behavioural, Cognitive and Discursive Psychologies by David Pavón Cuéllar
• How to be Secretly Lacanian in Anti-Psychoanalytic Qualitative Research by Christian Ingo Lenz Dunker and Ian Parker
• I Started Off with Nothing by Rob Weatherill
• Practices, Provenances, Homologies? by Bill Roper
• Writing an Algebra for the Social Sciences: Freud’s and Lacan’s Mathemes by Carlos Gómez
• Queering Psychoanalysis/Psychoanalysing Queer by Eve Watson

II

• Who Wants to be in Rational Love? by Calum Neill
• Restoring Universality to the Subject: Lacan’s Kantian Logic of Sexuation by Derek Hook
• Sexual Difference: Encore, Yet Again by Anup Dhar
• The Other Side of Social Psychology? A Review of the Utility of Lacanian Psychoanalysis with a Focus on the Theory of the Four Discourses by Peter Branney, Brendan Gough, Anna Madill

III

• Some Questions Around Social Imaginary and Discourse Analysis for Critical Research by Ilana Mountian
• Now that You Know, How do You Feel? The Milgram Experiment and Psychologization by Jan De Vos
• Logic of the Subject and the Other: Research Identities and Race…. by Kareen Malone & Gilda Barabino
• Oedipus and the Other in Japan by Kazushige Shingu
• An Effective Treatment of Psychosis with Psychoanalysis in Québec City, Since 1982 by Lucie Cantin
• Contested Identities: Using Lacanian Psychoanalysis to Explore and Develop Social Identity Theory by Parisa Dashtipour

IV

• The Lacanian Left, by Yannis Stavrakakis; Subjectivity and Otherness, by Lorenzo Chiesa; Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique, by Bruce Fink reviewed by Derek Hook
• My Teaching, by Jacques Lacan reviewed by Owen Hewitson

V

• Lacan’s Hairdresser: an Encounter with Karolos Kambelopoulos by Stavros Psaroudakis, Ian Parker, Erica Burman
• Critical Psychology: a Conversation with Slavoj Žižek by Ian Parker

Download the essays here: http://www.discourseunit.com/arcp/7.htm.

Pub: THE SYMPTOM 10 (2009).

Contents:

• Jacques-Alain Miller Another Lacan
• Jacques-Alain Miller Action of the Structure
• Jean-Luc Nancy Interview with Jacques Derrida
• Alain Badiou On a Finally Objectless Subject
• Shariar Vaghfipour A Monster Found Everywhere
• Bruce Fink The Seminar of Jacques Lacan
• Eric Laurent Psychoanalysis and Science
• Slavoj Zizek My Own Private Austria
• Jamieson Webster Drawing the Impossible
• Dylan Evans Science and Truth
• Thomas Svolos Ordinary Psychosis
• Charles Sheperdson A Pound of Flesh
• Pierre-Gilles Guéguen The Short Session
• Maire Jaanus Inhibition, Heautoscopy, Movement
• Richard Klein Lacan and Gödel
• Raphael Rubinstein Three Poems
• Maria Cristina Aguirre The Refusal of the Language of the Other
• Kirsten Hyldgaard Sex as Fantasy and Sex as Symptom
• Bernard Burgoyne and Darian Leader A Problem of Scientific Influence
• Allan Pero The Chiasm of Revolution

Visit the journal homepage here: http://www.lacan.com/thesymptom/. (thanks to www.continental-philosophy.org)

Butterworth, Trevor. "Prevarication Nation." BOOKFORUM (September-November 2008).

Rabaté, Jean-Michel. The Ethics of the Lie. New York: Other, 2008. Jean-Michel Rabaté, Vartan Gregorian Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, bookends The Ethics of the Lie with Jacques Lacan, the French psychiatrist who connected the anxieties of poststructuralism to those of psychoanalysis. At the beginning, we have the proposition, apropos Monica Lewinsky, that Bill Clinton may have been “the world’s first Lacanian president” because, as Lacan saw it, “there is no such thing as a sexual relationship” (and as Clinton tried to explain to a mortified nation, oral sex should be thought of as an aperitif rather than an entrée). At the end, and apropos Pinocchio’s nose, we are told that from a Lacanian point of view, “the lie always keeps something of the structure of the phallus, because the phallus is always like a joke, partakes [sic] of its mythical origins with the ludicrously inflated prosthesis carried on the stage in Aristophanes’ theater.” . . . Read the rest here: http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/015_03/2755. See also for the author's perspective on his book: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/home/SASFrontiers/rabate.html.

Pellauer, David. "Review of Karl Simms' RICOEUR AND LACAN." NDPR May 13, 2008.

Simms, Karl. Ricoeur and Lacan. London: Continuum, 2007. Simms says he wants to show that there are some real points of similarity between them, even if in the end they are irreconcilable, so one will read on perhaps wondering which way the balance will tip. The first of these points of contact we are told has to do with how both thinkers stand in relation to Descartes and more particularly to the Cartesian cogito, which each questions, but in different ways. The second point of contact has to do with their attitudes toward Freud, although here the gap between them is greater: Simms shows Ricoeur was never able to accept what he called Freud's realism while Lacan could and did, albeit in his own way. A sidelight here is Simms' effort to show that over time Ricoeur came less and less to emphasize this understanding of Freud, to the point even of arguing that Freud himself was not the victim of any vicious kind of naïve realism. For Ricoeur, Simms concludes, the unconscious finally remains relative to conscious awareness, albeit to that of another. This is unlike Lacan who always held that Freud had shown that there was such a thing as an independently existing unconscious, and that it not only existed independently of consciousness but could even be said to think. Simms' third point of comparison between Ricoeur and Lacan is their interpretations of Hegel's master-slave dialectic. For Lacan, "the mutual recognition of the master-slave dialectic is what originates desire as desire for another" (6); for Ricoeur, it has more to do with the birth of the self. It is this way of seeing things that helps Ricoeur argue that both phenomenology and psychoanalysis should be understood as forms of hermeneutics that themselves stand in a dialectical relationship, psychoanalysis serving as something like an archeology of the subject, phenomenology rather tending in the direction of a teleology of selfhood, a new understanding that incorporates the unconscious into an enlarged self-understanding. In a word, then, one organizing structure of this book is to show that Lacan and Ricoeur take up similar themes but they reach quite different conclusions. . . . Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=13064.

Godelek, Kamuran. "Review of Lorenzo Chiesa's SUBJECTIVITY AND OTHERNESS." METAPSYCHOLOGY ONLINE REVIEWS April 22, 2008.

Chiesa, Lorenzo. Subjectivity and Otherness: a Philosophical Reading of Lacan. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. In a speech given in 1955 in Vienna, the birthplace of psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan famously called for a "return to Freud". Lacan saw his mission as one of rescuing the meaning of Freud's texts from his own disciples, and that impulse remained at the heart of his analytic enterprise, one of the twentieth century's seismic intellectual events. On the basis of Freud's discoveries, Lacan outlines a revolutionary theory of the subject and, despite his relentless attacks against philosophy, repeatedly invites it to collaborate with psychoanalysis in order to build on his groundbreaking investigations. It is Chiesa's belief that "unfortunately such a call has largely gone unheard ... and that especially in light of the recent and widespread debate over a return of the subject in contemporary European philosophy, Lacan's psychoanalytic theory of subjectivity must be reconsidered as an innovative point of reference ... and must carefully be expounded (p. 6). The principal aim of Chiesa in this book, therefore, is to analyze the evolution of the concept of subjectivity in the works of Jacques Lacan by countering both a call from some "pro-Lacanians" for an end to the exegesis of his work and the dismissal of it by "anti-Lacanians" who hold it to be impenetrable. Against both sides, he offers a thorough and fruitful philosophical analysis of Lacan's theory of the subject. More specifically, it endeavors to carry out a detailed reading of the Lacanian subject in its necessary relation to otherness according to the three orders of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real. In each phase, the subject is defined against a different order of otherness: the Imaginary in the first phase, the Symbolic in the second, and the Real in the third. Cutting against the grain of much recent Lacan scholarship, Chiesa emphasizes the continuity underlying the three phases of Lacan's theory of subjectivity. And he shows how in each successive stage, the older theory is recuperated and incorporated into the new one. . . . Read the rest here: http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net:80/poc/view_doc.php?type=book&id=4196.